Buffalo selling UpgradEees for subnotebook SSD

A new line of SSDs from Buffalo plug directly into PCIe and are compatible …

Asus' Eee PC line has met with a lot of interest, sold strongly, and has launched an entire industry sector of competing subnotebooks, but a persistent prjoblem has been the device's comparatively anemic storage portfolio. A new product by Buffalo may solve this problem by offering large amounts of upgradable SSD storage to Eee users.

The base Eee offers only 2GB of flash storage, and even the 9" Eee 900-series parcels out additional NAND in miserly blocks of 4GB at heavy cost. To address this, Buffalo has developed and is selling a NAND Flash SSD compatible with the Eee 900-series. The new devices allow 32GB and 64GB of storage added to the Eee for $150 or $300. Price is not quite competitive with the OCZ Core line.

The specific device is a bit pricey for the Eee. The 64GB model costs as much as the bottom-of-the-line Eee 700 2G, which will probably make Eee users reluctant to shell out so much money, especially since doing so would allow them to step up to the HP Mini-Note or another competing product. On the other hand, Eees equipped with a hefty storage capacity, with their same small size and other appealing features, could compete directly with these other devices. Also, consumers who want more space can replace the unit's SSD when they need it.

The strategy involved is interesting. The new devices do not connect via a hard disk bus like SATA, but instead connect directly to PCIe, as the Eee's stock SSD does. This approach eliminates performance bottlenecks to do with the SATA bus, although it's very unlikely that the Buffalo drives would hit those limits. The new device is Eee-specific, since the direct-from-PCIe and the plug used appear to be incompatible with other PCs, for now.

On the other hand, this may spark a renaissance in disk interchangability on subnotebooks. Before now, subnotebooks seeking more storage or higher performance have had to use tiny hard disks like in the Everex Cloudbook, or settle for a size, weight, and power consumption sacrifice by going all the way to 2.5" hard disks. If the third-party Eee SSD catches on, other subnotebook vendors may start building their subnotebooks to accept the new devices, creating a de=facto standard for subnotebook SSD intercompatibility. This is a very exciting development.